Automatic, adaptive load balancing is essential for handling load
imbalance that may occur during parallel finite element simulations
involving mesh adaptivity, nonlinear material behavior and other
localized effects. This paper demonstrates the successful
application of a measurement-based dynamic load balancing concept
to the finite element analysis of elasto-plastic wave propagation
and dynamic fracture events. The simulations are performed with the
aid of a parallel framework for unstructured meshes called ParFUM,
which is based on Charm++ and Adaptive MPI (AMPI) and involves
migratable user-level threads. The performance was analyzed using
Projections, a performance analysis and post factum visualization
tool. The bottlenecks to scalability are identified and eliminated
using a variety of strategies resulting in performance gains
ranging from moderate to highly significant.